onstage was terrifying, beyond just the stigma. He could never have opened his mouth up there.
He’d mentioned it, offhand, to the shrink he’d seen at U of M, a guy who would occasionally suggest that Yale wasn’t so much homosexual as lonely. “Could that desire be about your mother?” he’d said. “A desire to connect with your mother, through the theater?” And Yale had brushed it off, said that wasn’t it at all. But he’d wondered, in the years since, if it weren’t even simpler than that—if he didn’t possess some latent theater gene that would never emerge but that he could feel, now and then, tugging.
It wasn’t till halfway through the first act that Yale spotted Asher Glass two rows ahead. The stage lights glowed through the backs of his ears, turned them translucent so Yale could see their threadlike veins.
At intermission, they found Asher in the lobby, looking at the racks of books and T-shirts the company had brought in for sale.
Yale said, “It’s not bad, right?”
“Jesus, I don’t know. I don’t know why I’m here. I can’t concentrate, can you?”
“I think it’s okay to let your mind wander.”
Asher looked back blankly. “No, I mean Teddy. I’m thinking about Teddy.”
Charlie’s voice turned thin. “Is he, what, is he sick?”
Asher let out a strange, short burst of laughter. “Someone broke his nose. Last night.”
“What?”
“They banged his head into the sidewalk. He was on campus at Loyola. He teaches some undergrad class, right? And he was walking back afterward and someone just—” He pantomimed it on his own head, grabbing his hair and thrusting himself forward. “On the sidewalk. It wasn’t a robbery even.”
“Is he—”
“He’s fine. He’s got a bandage across, and two stitches, and a black eye. He’s home, if you—but he’s okay. It’s more the fact of it. They have no idea who did this. One person, five. Students, punks, some asshole just strolling through campus.”
“Have you seen him?” Charlie asked.
“Yeah. Yeah, I went to help him deal with the cops. You know how they are. Even if someone’s caught, they’ll say it was gay panic, say you put your hand down their pants, whatever. You’re covering this in the paper, right?”
“In general?” Charlie said. “Violence?”
“No, this. Will you write about Teddy?”
Charlie pulled at his lip. “It’d be up to Teddy. And my editor.”
“You’re gonna cover it. I’m following up tomorrow.”
And then it was time to head back in.
Yale tried to pay attention, but he saw Teddy’s face hitting the sidewalk again and again, and because there were so many different ways he could picture it, he was compelled to picture them all: undergrads following him out of class; teenagers on bikes, a sudden inspiration. Teddy was so small. He closed his eyes, squeezed the image out physically.
He glanced at Charlie a few times, tried to read his face. Charlie drummed his fingers on the armrest, but he’d done that through the first act too.
Afterward, Yale wanted to join the crowd waiting to congratulate Julian—Asher and those guys from the sandwich shop where Julian worked and the chubby accountant Julian used to see—but Charlie had to get to work. “You can hang back if you want,” he said, but Yale wasn’t an idiot.
* * *
—
That Friday was the day before Hanukkah began, and so when Yale walked in to work and Bill Lindsey grinned and said there was something waiting on his desk, Yale was terrified it was going to be a menorah. Bill was either overly interested in Judaism, or had been using a feigned interest in Judaism as a way to awkwardly flirt. But instead, Yale found a large envelope with a return address in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin. He felt adrenaline flood his thighs, as if the situation might require sprinting.
Bill hadn’t followed him in, which he easily could have. He also could have opened the envelope. Yale had to give the man credit: He knew how to let people have their moments.
Yale hadn’t told Bill yet about his conversation with Cecily. He’d been hoping to ignore the problem away. Bill did know the basic details of their trip north, and he knew that Yale was intrigued by the artwork. That was the word Yale had carefully chosen, intrigued, rather than excited. In part because it wasn’t Yale’s place to get worked up about art or to assess its value.
He tore into the package and spread the Polaroids—more than a dozen of them—across the surface. A blur of color and lines and reflective glare. There was